Our Story
A 15-Year Story of Partnership, Prevention, and Learning
CSAW’s story began with a community question: What would it take to move from responding to child abuse after harm occurs toward preventing it?
For nearly 15 years, that question has shaped an evolving partnership between the University of Oregon and Oregon communities. What began as a place-based effort to prevent child abuse and neglect in Lane County has grown into a broader body of research, prevention, evaluation, and community-engaged work focused on strengthening the conditions that support childhood safety and wellbeing.
Along the way, the work has changed. So has our understanding of prevention. What has remained constant is a commitment to bringing research, lived experience, community knowledge, and practice together—and learning over time.
2011: It Began With a Community Vision
CSAW’s formation was influenced by survivors, human rights and social justice advocates, the Trauma Healing Project, Lane County residents, and partners within and beyond the University of Oregon.
On February 5, 2011, 225 Lane County residents gathered as part of the University of Oregon College of Education’s Next 100 Years series. The Partnership for Nonviolence segment was spearheaded by Jeff Todahl of the UO College of Education, Megan Shultz of CASA and 15th Night, and Alicia Hayes of Lane County Public Health and the 4J School Board.
Participants were asked to imagine a future in which child abuse and neglect occurred far less often.
Their conversations led to an important conclusion: strong intervention and response systems were essential, but response alone would not produce population-level reductions in child abuse and neglect. Lane County also needed a sustained commitment to primary prevention.
From those conversations came an ambitious question: What would it take to substantially reduce child abuse and neglect across an entire community?
2011–2012: 90by30 Takes Shape
The 90by30 Initiative grew from that community vision, with an aspirational goal of reducing child abuse and neglect in Lane County by 90 percent.
The goal was intentionally ambitious. It asked people to begin with the end in mind and consider the practical roles individuals, organizations, neighborhoods, schools, systems, and communities could play in creating safe, healthy, and nurturing environments for children.
From the beginning, 90by30 was envisioned as a grassroots prevention effort connected to the research and outreach capacity of a public university. Prevention would not simply be developed at the university and delivered to communities. Research and community knowledge would need to inform one another.
That idea became foundational to the Center’s approach.
2012: A University Center Is Established
In April 2012, the Center for the Prevention of Abuse and Neglect (CPAN) was established within the University of Oregon College of Education.
The Center provided research, measurement, evaluation, and backbone capacity for the emerging 90by30 effort while creating a university home where prevention knowledge could accumulate over time.
The Ford Family Foundation became the Center’s first major funder and a long-term partner. Its support helped sustain rural community engagement, developmental evaluation, and, later, the pilot and statewide development of the Oregon Child Abuse Prevalence Study (OCAPS).
2012–2015: Listening Before Acting
One of the Center’s earliest commitments was to understand what communities already knew.
During its first three years, staff and Regional Leadership Team volunteers surveyed, interviewed, and listened to more than 12,000 residents as part of the development of a research-informed, community-generated child abuse prevention plan.
Community engagement happened in schools and community centers, granges and Dari Marts, and other places where people already gathered. Participants included parents, young people, survivors, incarcerated men, people participating in batterer intervention, Head Start and Early Head Start families, and other community members whose perspectives were often missing from traditional planning processes.
The work also included Whatcom County, Washington, as a comparator community.
These conversations explored community knowledge, attitudes, and prevention behaviors related to child abuse and neglect. The questions reflected those raised during the Next 100 Years gathering, allowing the developing prevention effort to continue learning from a much broader group of people.
This period helped establish a principle that continues to guide CSAW: communities are not simply places where prevention happens. They are sources of knowledge essential to understanding what prevention should look like.
2016–2017: From Community Knowledge to Local Prevention
What communities shared helped inform locally developed prevention plans across seven Lane County regions.
Regional Leadership Teams worked with the Center to identify strategies responsive to local strengths, relationships, and needs. Prevention approaches included efforts such as prevention education, Parent and Community Cafés, Roots of Empathy, Welcome Baby Bundles, Safe Families for Children, and other locally selected strategies.
This created an opportunity to learn not only whether particular approaches were promising, but what it took to implement, adapt, sustain—and sometimes reconsider—them under real-world conditions.
The community-campus collective impact approach developed through 90by30 was later recognized by the U.S. Children’s Bureau.
An important shift was underway: prevention was becoming less about finding a single program and more about understanding how communities could build the relationships, practices, resources, and conditions that support safety.
2019: Learning Directly From Young People
Another question became increasingly important: How do we know whether children and young people are actually becoming safer?
Traditional measures of child abuse and neglect rely heavily on reports made to institutions. Those measures are important, but they cannot tell us everything young people experience or what young people themselves believe would make violence less likely.
CSAW developed the Oregon Child Abuse Prevalence Study (OCAPS) to learn directly from young people about experiences of abuse, neglect, identity-based violence, disclosure, help-seeking, relationships, resilience, and prevention.
Following initial testing with University of Oregon undergraduates, OCAPS was piloted in Lane County high schools in 2019, laying groundwork for statewide implementation.
OCAPS also reflected a larger evolution in CSAW’s work: moving beyond researching young people’s experiences toward creating more meaningful ways for youth knowledge to inform how prevention questions are asked, findings are understood, and prevention approaches are developed.
Learning Through Prevention in Practice
Over time, CSAW’s work expanded beyond the original 90by30 effort.
Through initiatives including Protect Our Children, Parent and Community Cafés, Cultivate, OCAPS, the Youth Advisory Council, prevention coalitions, professional learning, and statewide partnerships, CSAW and its partners have continued to test, adapt, evaluate, and learn from prevention in real-world settings.
Some approaches have grown and continued. Others have changed. Approaches that did not work as expected have also contributed important learning.
Long-term evaluation has made it possible to examine changes that may not be visible within a short grant or program cycle. Community partnerships have shown the importance of local adaptation. Parent and Community Cafés have reinforced the value of spaces built around connection and shared learning rather than one-way delivery of expertise. Rural partnerships have demonstrated why prevention approaches developed in one place cannot simply be assumed to work the same way somewhere else.
Across these experiences, CSAW’s central prevention question continued to evolve.
The question shifted from “Which programs should we implement?” toward “Which conditions should we deliberately strengthen, and how will we know whether they are changing?”
An Expanding Understanding of Prevention
Nearly 15 years of research, evaluation, implementation, community experience, and learning from youth and survivors have contributed to a broader understanding of what makes childhood violence less likely.
Programs matter. But programs operate within relationships, organizations, communities, and systems.
Children’s experiences are shaped by belonging and connection, trustworthy adults, opportunities for agency, what happens when a young person seeks help, community norms, institutional practices, available resources, systems coordination, policy, stigma, inequity, and many other conditions around them.
This accumulated learning contributed to CSAW’s Youth and Survivor-Inspired Promotive Action Plan and Theory of Change, which focus attention on conditions that communities and systems can deliberately strengthen so that safety, connection, effective help-seeking and response, healing, and accountability become more likely.
It also reinforced another lesson: relationships and community coordination are not simply ways to implement prevention strategies. They are part of the infrastructure that makes sustained prevention possible.
2025: From CPAN to CSAW
In 2025, the Center for the Prevention of Abuse and Neglect became the Center for Childhood Safety and Wellbeing (CSAW).
The new name reflected an evolution already underway in the work.
CSAW retained its commitment to preventing child abuse and neglect while more explicitly emphasizing the conditions we want children, young people, families, and communities to experience: safety, wellbeing, belonging, connection, agency, healing, and equity.
The Center’s scope also expanded explicitly to include identity-based violence alongside child abuse, neglect, exposure to intimate partner violence, and related interpersonal harm.
The change reflected an increasingly clear prevention philosophy: reducing violence matters, but prevention also asks us to identify and deliberately strengthen the conditions in which children and communities can thrive.
A Research to Community Partnership
CSAW’s history has also helped clarify the role a public research university can play in prevention.
A university can provide capacities that are difficult to sustain through individual projects alone: research and evaluation, measurement, interdisciplinary scholarship, prevention and implementation science, professional learning, students and emerging professionals, institutional infrastructure, and the ability to accumulate knowledge across many years.
But university knowledge is only one form of knowledge.
A rural prevention leader may understand why an approach will not work in a particular community. A survivor may recognize an institutional practice that undermines trust. A young person may see why a message developed by adults will not reach their peers. A parent may know whether support feels useful or intrusive. A teacher may understand what can realistically be sustained in a school. Community organizations hold relationships and histories that universities do not.
Today, we describe this orientation as a Research to Community Partnership: bringing research capacity into relationship with community knowledge, lived expertise, practice, and place—and remaining engaged long enough for learning to accumulate and inform what comes next.
The Next Chapter
Fifteen years of research, prevention practice, evaluation, and community partnership have given us a clearer picture of what sustained childhood violence prevention requires.
CSAW's Promotive Action Plan and Theory of Change bring much of that learning together: identifying conditions that can be deliberately strengthened so that violence becomes less likely and safety, belonging, connection, agency, healing, and wellbeing become more likely.
Our next question is how to build the capacity to strengthen those conditions comprehensively, learn from implementation over time, and make that learning useful beyond a single community.
We envision CSAW and its community partnerships as a national demonstration site for childhood violence prevention: a place where university capacity and community knowledge come together to build, test, measure, and refine an integrated approach to prevention.
This next phase is taking shape around five interconnected areas: sustained prevention infrastructure; ongoing data collection and learning; meaningful youth and survivor partnership; prevention education and real-world implementation; and place-based prevention leadership.
The goal is to learn what it takes to establish these capacities together in partnership with a public research university, understand how they contribute to stronger conditions for childhood safety and wellbeing, and translate what we learn into approaches that other communities can adapt to their own contexts.
